Duke Nukem Forever, probably the best known example of vapourware in PC gaming, may now never be completed. Developer 3D Realms has shut down, a company employee has stated.
3D Realms webmaster Joe Siegler told 3D Realms forum members that rumours of the company's closure were "not a marketing thing. It's true".
Certainly, the …

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I did check up from time to time to see if there was any progress..

There was some talk that it might see the light of day this year. Or was it next year?

I imagine the offices will continue to be staffed late at night, by a ghoulish, insane programmer, who frightens off the locals and is eventually captured by a group of plucky teenagers and their dog, before finally being unmasked as the caretaker, who was planning to buy up the land and sell it on to developers and would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids, and that dog.

GPL Please

Open Source it?

Is there anyone left to care?

Duke Nukem was of it's time. Damn, I had fun with that game, the interactivity and level design it had was terrific. It was a novelty at the time with no competition but let's face it, it's a very different gaming market now. So, the question is, does anyone really care if there is ever a follow up, apart for nostalgic reasons?

Build was a big reason for success

Like Doom, you could make your own maps. That meant, after you had played your way through the game and fragged your mates on the standard maps, you could spend hours making your own maps in an intuitive and quick 3D tool. I still remember getting a friend that had never even used a map tool to get his first map done in Build in about fifteen minutes. The subsquent success of games such as Counter Strike Source have largely been due to a large following of fans that cut their teeth on Build and now make maps for newer games. It's all a shame, really, but I actually thought 3D Realms had gone bust years ago!

Way to go, George ...

A pity, but not altogether unexpected - Duke 3D is still one of my favourite games on *any* platform (never been much of a fan of Doom) and it says a lot for any game which still has so much playability after Ghod knows how long.

The only happy ending I can see here is if the code gets open-sourced, otherwise it'll be treated as yet another half-arsed cash cow.

@Kevin Campbell

Blizzard is accepting closed beta sign ups for SC2 right now. So with the way closed Beta went on blizz's last expansion in wow expect it probably be released by December with no bug fixes for bugs that were reported.

and Diablo 3 they just started working on not that long ago so you gotta wait for that.

Now on the other hand I always called it Duke Nukem Fornever personally it really irked all the people i knew that were duke3d fans

@ Kev Campbell

Industry insider monkeys says : SC2 is in final rounds of beta, test-booths have been seen at events like PAX. expect a buggy POS to be released sometime between december and june next year, judging by blizzards current release quality.

Diablo 3 : Since the shit his the fan with fans demanding more dark, less cartoony*, Ive not heard a lot since. As far as I'm aware, they have the engine prettymuch finished and its just content building from here on in

As for DNF/Franchise, expect to see a sequel shortly if 3DRealms has folded : Take2 will want some ROI from the franchise, and frankly, I'd like to see Valve pick it up. The source engine would be a good platform, and they've shown with things like TF2 and Portal that they have a sense of humour that they can work into a game. and a producer-publisher combo is probably the best way to go, some insidious little one-time production house being farmed by EA or Ubisoft would likely result in a rushed nasty POS. mind you, theres no real guard against crap : everyone believed in Romero, and we ended up with 'Storm over gift 3' and bloody awful Daikatana.

either way, I'll still be happy to hear the sound of those pig-guards in games here and there, and 'll miss Duke, in all his pixellated glory.

-H

*production stills give you a colourful sparkly world like NWN2 with all the spell effects turned to 'rainbows and kittens'

I suppose...

Broussard=Fail

Open Source? Get real!

F/LOSS is completely unsuited for some types of application - games being near the top of that list.

You can't get coherent art direction from part-time amateurs and, unlike code monkeys, digital artists have very little reason to give away their work. High production values also require staff working closely together - and, often, for long hours, motivated by fear for their jobs - because you can't make a silk shirt the way you'd make a patchwork quilt.

Games are very much a "Cathedral" application, so "Bazaar" techniques are inadequate and inappropriate. Just look at what pass for open source games - nethack derivatives, a bunch of clones of casual/parlour/puzzle games, some sim/war games, the occasional bit of piss-poor 3d, and a handful of closed-source commercial games dumped out long after their value has expired.

(Coat, because that's apparently all 3DR's people will be leaving with)

3D Realms

12 years of 'kicking back and chewing the cud', eh? Well, I guess you're all out of cud!

Most nostalgics seem to forget this, but when Duke Nukem 3d came out, it was at the tail end of the sprite-based 3d shooters, and it required an inexplicable number of hardware resources to run, considering that all it offered over its earlier rivals, was vertical layering. Rival firms were already starting to offer polygonal rendering, at this stage, and what 3dRealms offered, at the time, was a secondrate and rabidly sexist story line designed to pander to teenage boys, (in fact, the story was so heavily ripped off from Doom, that the developers even put in deliberate references, to that effect). I feel that Duke Nukem is one of those franchises we are supposed to love, in the same we we are all supposed to adore ABBA. Applying any critical faculty to it, and saying: "You know, that was actually crap: good riddance" causes you to be vilified, in much the same way as the ostracism you will recieve for pointing out that writing tunes that stick in your head and annoy you for the rest of the day, is not the same as being a musical genius.

I personally expected any eventual DNF release to consist of a Doom 3 style fumble - perhaps with much eye-candy, but wrapped around the same kind of unimaginative and restictive game-play that tried to force the player to admire the special effects, rather than proceed with whatever flimsy plot, thyere was to follow. 3Drealms never had any original ideas of their own, anyway, so I suppose all we've been spared, is the embarrasment of trying to like, whatever it was, they were eventually going to release on us.

@ daniel re: nostalga

dont forget that the original quake ran like a dog on the same systems that duke would play quite happily.

quake: any more than 5 or 6 bad guys in a room and most computers of the time would crawl, (no more than 3 onscreen at any one time) unless you had a bajillion quid for a 3d accellerator card (gl quake gasp!), thats what made quake death match suck in the long term... that and all the brown... and the lag...

duke: streets that looked sorta like streets, "many" bad guys, the same juvinile humour that has kept GTA, south park, bevis and buthead et al solvent for decades (well 1, anyway), i mean a lot of us *were* teenage boys then, and we were the only ones playing computer games, or at least the only ones that would pay to see cartoon strippers.

as for comparisons to ABBA, most of the music of theirs that is around now has been filtered by years of people forgetting about the rubbish. (how many albums full of songs? how many songs could we name?)

so yes, the ai was crap (as with all fps till half life), the graphics were pixely even by the standards of the time, but all that was swept away when Duke would pipe up with a "witty" comment, or the many comedy deaths that could be caused.

(Hell, even the bugs could be funny, like how duke could kick with his right foot and left foot *at the same time* and remain standing.)

@ Glen

I had to register just to respond to your quake analysis. bajillion quid...it was $325 bucks for a 3d accelerator, I was in my early 20s and had 2 kids when I purchased my first voodoo1 card, so it wasn't prohibitively expensive. Quake deathmatch didn't suck....ever, and CTF was outstanding with 16 players on a dial-up connection! I should know I played it for years. It rocked and will ALWAYS be #1 as far as shooters go for pure instantaneous, non-stop action. You have no idea what you're talking about.

But as far as Duke Nukem Forever. Good. It's about time 3DRealms bit the dust. How they 'survived' this long with vaporware is beyond me. Bunch of losers.